For years, Ipsos has been asking individuals around the world for their opinions on Queer people. And for years, the pollster has found, those opinions have steadily improved. People had been growing more and more supportive of the LGBTQ community with each passing year, especially in Canada.
In 2011, more than six-in-ten Canadians said people should be open about their sexual orientation and gender identity; even more voiced support for anti-discrimination laws; more, still, endorsed Queer couples adopting children.
But this year, those trends suddenly reversed.
Ipsos’s 2024 survey found a 12 point drop in the number of Canadians who support Queer people being open and visible in society. That puts us on par with Poland and the United States. Support has plummeted across the board for Queer people holding hands in public, for anti-discrimination protections, and for healthcare for trans people.
The protest and revelry of Pride month is over. Now we need to take stock of why support for our community has plunged. To me, it’s no great mystery: Conservative politicians in this country, and around the world, have been attacking the LGBTQ community and they’ve radicalized their supporters in the process. We know what happens if this doesn’t stop. We’ve seen it before. Our rights get repealed. Anti-Queer violence climbs. Our hard-won progress bleeds away.
Playing politics with trans rights
Anti-Queer rhetoric has gotten very bad, very fast.
When he first ran for the White House, Donald Trump was downright liberal on LGBTQ issues. Today, he bloviates about “left-wing gender insanity,” wants to ban all transgender healthcare, and surrounds himself with militant activists who smear all Queer people as “groomers.”
Here in Canada, some conservatives have waded into the same waters. Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has announced plans to impose a ban on gender-affirming healthcare for younger teens, over the objections of many parents. Saskatchewan and New Brunswick premiers Scott Moe and Blaine Higgs have forbidden students from using their preferred pronouns or given names without parental permission.
Last year, members of the Conservative Party of Canada adopted policy positions meant to “protect our kids” by forbidding trans healthcare for minors and dictating that certain spaces be sex-specific, forcing trans people in the wrong bathrooms, for example.
For a minute, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre seemed to resist going down this road. Last year, I quizzed a high-ranking Conservative Member of Parliament about Poilievre’s intentions. Poilievre was never going to drape himself in a trans flag, the MP assured me, but he had no plans to embrace transphobic policies.
“They know (doing that would) fuel hatred,” that MP told me. They did it anyway.
Earlier this year, I asked Poilievre his position on banning healthcare for trans youth. He didn’t answer. Instead, he accused me of “spreading disinformation,” and of refusing to discuss the actual policies in question. (His handlers snatched the microphone away before I could respond.) He ranted that “Justin Trudeau has spread hatred against parents.”
A day later, Poilievre went even further than Smith, calling for a total ban on puberty blockers and hormones for those under 18. “I think we should protect children,” Poilievre told reporters. From whom, he didn’t say.
Deciphering Poilievre’s tactics is not difficult. The Conservative Party, under its previous leader, Erin O’Toole, had tried to cement itself as solidly pro-LGBTQ, even helping to speed through a ban on conversion therapy. Looking back, conservative organizers I’ve spoken to now believe that was a mistake. They think it alienated a rump of their core supporters, pushing them into the arms of Maxime Bernier. Winning them back, Poilievre’s team thinks, means parroting their concerns.
History repeats itself
Trans people have seen this pattern before. “We go through these cycles of reappearing in media that go back to the beginning of newspapers,” Morgan M. Page, an excellent Queer historian, told me recently. “There’s never been a 10 year period in the history of newspapers in the English language where trans people have not become a focus of attention.”
You can go back at least to the 1920s, when Berlin doctor Magnus Hirschfeld was doing pioneering work on sexuality and genders. His motto, “through science to justice,” led to the founding of an institute for the study of gender identity and some of the earliest gender confirmation procedures.
But amid economic turmoil and strife, the backlash began. The Nazis targeted Hirschfeld, alleging he was part of a Jewish conspiracy to encourage degeneracy. Hitler Youth raided his institute and burned his research in the street. But it was the conservative Catholic establishment, pressed by the far-right, that declared the nascent LGBTQ community “dangerous” and sent police to crack down. Hirschfeld died in exile.
This same cycle recurred again and again throughout the 20th century. When some of the earliest Queer organizing secured a key anti-discrimination ordinance in Miami in the 1970s, a former orange juice pitchwoman named Anita Bryant fought to have it repealed. Crying “save our children,” she rallied the people to vote it down by a two-to-one margin.
It happened in Canada, too. In the 1990s, Ontario had been a world leader in gender-affirming care — ‘sex change operations,’ as they were called then. But a newly-elected Mike Harris abruptly delisted the procedures from the provincial health plan. “I came out in the 10 year period when it was not covered,” Page said. “That was a very tricky time.”
It would take until 2008 for Premier Dalton McGuinty to reverse the change and cover the surgeries again. Back then, a 28-year-old Pierre Poilievre was already serving his second term in Parliament. He went on the warpath, vowing to lobby his government to ensure that “federal health transfers should go only to vital health care treatments and not to the McGuinty sex-change program.”
Today, Poilievre is just rehashing the same tired tactics.
A vortex of conspiracy and rage
For decades, the LGBTQ community has made progress by lauding supportive politicians, cajoling the skeptical, and admonishing the moral crusaders and charlatans. Doing that requires a real diversity of tactics: Rioting, protesting, lobbying, and running for office.
But today, as Page puts it, there is an online “vortex” of conspiratorial thought targeting Queer people. Now the LGBTQ movement doesn’t just need to convince, we need to pull people out of the whirlpool. Poilievre and his ilk are making that much harder to do.
Politicians have enabled this toxicity by actively misrepresenting the issue, claiming children are being hurt or indoctrinated by health professionals. Major medical associations in Canada and the United States continue to support this healthcare and oppose the kind of bans Smith has announced (and Poilievre supports.) There is ample study and debate happening amongst the experts, some politicians just don’t care.
In recent years in Canada, we have seen a marked rise in what political scientists call “affective polarization.” Our divides are increasingly not driven by genuine policy concerns or honest debate, but by rabid partisanship and culture wars. Poilievre has helped turn opposing Queer rights into a partisan merit badge. It has increasingly become something his supporters wear, with pride, as a token of group identity.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has enabled this same process from the other side. By constantly smearing the Conservative Party as anti-LGBTQ — even when politicians like O’Toole were desperately trying to moderate — he drew a line in the sand. Far from helping the Queer community, Trudeau convinced many Conservatives they had nothing to gain by embracing Queer rights.
Conservatives may be driving the bandwagon, but this backlash is bigger than any one party or politician. This culture war has now unleashed irate parents who are flooding school boards and city council meetings, alleging a Queer plot to indoctrinate children. They have been sucked into the vortex, and now want books banned and Queer teachers drummed out of schools.
Some Conservatives will try and spin this trend away. They oscillate between blaming Trudeau’s “wokeness” and deflecting responsibility for the slide in LGBTQ support onto new immigrants. One Queer Tory, however, told me that the Conservatives know full well what they’re doing. But, “no one will contradict the leader explicitly or flirt with the line that may be considered contradicting,” they said. So the Queer people in the party sit idly by as their leader sings Anita Byrant karaoke.
We often talk about the history of the LGBTQ community as a very straight line, from obscurity to acceptance. In fact, it has been a twisting and curving road, a history of progress and retreat. Right now, in Canada, the backlash is on.
Clarification — July 9, 2024
This article has been updated to clarify that Alberta Premier Danielle Smith announced plans to impose a ban on gender-affirming healthcare for younger teens.
